Ex-Meta recruiter was paid $190K ‘to do nothing’ ahead of mass layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Meta recruiter was paid $190K ‘to do nothing’ ahead of mass layoffs

nypost.com

27 pointsthedrbrian30 comments

This is common at large orgs. Not specifically about recruiters, but entire teams of people that have very little to do and exist to enhance the prestige (budget / headcount) of a leader or department. FAANG companies had this weird dynamic of competing with each other on every metric, from employee benefits to total employees to employees-per-manager to catered lunches and on and on, but that's over now.

Anecdotally I know a laid off Meta engineer. They are really trying to get that ~$700k total comp they had before but it just isn't happening, and his lifestyle includes multiple houses, private schools, luxury cars, and a boat. He's aware that he has to downsize soon but is still holding out hope.

> This is common at large orgs. Not specifically about recruiters, but entire teams of people that have very little to do and exist to enhance the prestige (budget / headcount) of a leader or department.

There's probably more than one reason for anything complicated in a large bureaucracy, but it's hard not to assume in some cases that the more pointless positions partially exist to meet some kind of corporate DEI goals.

> ~$700k total comp

Must give META credit for really setting a standard for dev compensation. Kudos to Mark.

This is usually the kind of thing you keep to yourself. This individual went completely in the opposite direction and is using it for clout and attention on Tik Tok.

I read somehwere on Reddit this morning someone saying attention is one of the most important currencies of our society nowadays.

In my experience recruiters routinely do nothing. I hired a substantial team of about 50 engineers at a FAANG by getting a LinkedIn recruiter account, thinking hard about the geographical state of tech and where I could find engineers looking to get a better job in a better place and directly in mailing them as the leader of the org. I customized each message and made it clear I was the one hiring and I’m not a recruiter. I had as much as a 70% initial conversion rate and a 30% overall conversion to offer rate. It was grueling because we are still talking about somewhere in the 200+ person range to interact with in addition to my normal job. But in that time I got precisely zero hires out of recruiting and sourcing.

I don't think many engineers want to do hiring, but I'm 100% certain that even the most introvert and unmotivated engineer would do a better job at it for technical fields than 99% of recruiters.

I think many recruiters do about as much as they can without knowing technology at all.

The problem is that they can't really do much of anything other than being a middleman without knowing technology.

I don't mean that recruiters must be able to code or anything. I mean that recruiters should be able to have an intelligent 5 minute conversation with somebody about some of their projects, ask an intelligent question or two, and be able to have a fairly solid idea if the applicant is likely to be full of shit or not.

This is why we get plenty of dumb things like recruiters asking job applicants for a laundry list of dumb "How many years of experience do you have with X technology?" questions. It's about all they are capable of.

Yeah and to be clear I’m the most introverted of all folks, and it was literally torture forcing myself to do this but I wanted to actually get my effort done and I could see from my peer teams the sourcing and recruiting functions were not functional.

I don’t think they actually do nothing though. They’re just highly ineffectual. Not only do they target candidates wrong as you mention they’re known to be five steps removed from any decision. The power of being the hiring manager and directly involved in the project is hard to measure but it’s significant.

The other issue is recruiters don’t actually know the tech landscape in enough detail. They know the rough shape of major employers, but details like “UIUC is in central Illinois and there aren’t many employees in the area and those that are there aren’t that desirable so recruiting phd students out of the program isn’t that hard” or “national labs under Trump are a terrible place to work so recruit folks working on climate change super computing projects” aren’t practically tractable. They’re also, to your point, unaware of the adjacencies of technologies - while they know what stack you’re hiring for, they can’t know X is similar to Y so X is sufficient.

It’s a hard job and entirely thankless, and I always feel tremendous empathy and sympathy for folks in the recruiter role. But that doesn’t help the fact they’re almost entirely useless in that role.

> It’s a hard job and entirely thankless, and I always feel tremendous empathy and sympathy for folks in the recruiter role.

Every job has good and bad things about it, and I'd acknowledge that there's some really bad aspects to recruiting such as the following:

> Having to give people bad news frequently is emotionally draining to them sometimes.

> I'm sure it gets quite monotonous to round up a bunch of candidates for any role. You probably have to call a lot of people and have the same conversations over and over and over again, day in and out.

> Being among the first in line for layoffs in bad times sucks.

> I'm sure some client demands they get are unreasonable. There are companies that want to immediately find somebody who takes 50% of the average developer salary who has the technical experience of an entire IT department in 1 person.

That said, recruiters can get a pretty favorable overall path in life: for a small fraction of the mental effort of a developer, you can get a fairly large percentage of their salary without having any notable skills other than a few general skills such as being able to organize sending emails and maintaining appointments on a calendar.

"Hey, giant rectangle here just passing through."

"Another giant rectangle. I'm also going to make the rest of the screen darker. Hope that's okay."

"Look, I know you were part way through reading something but it's vitally important you stop and pay attention right now to this thing that's actually stalled loading."

This woman was fired from Meta for posting a social media video about Meta’s “baby benefits”. Now she posts another video saying she was useless to the org for 2 years and liked that job. Does she enjoy sabotaging her career for likes?

I think she got a new career now. Recruiting doesnt seem to be in high demand

This woman

Could you clarify the meaning of your comment?

I found the use of "this woman" as the opening of the paragraph to be a tad offensive. To me, it felt like another form of the phrase "these people"

You should have clarified your intent in your comment (I did expect you to say this).

I understand your feeling, but you should let it go. You are imputing your own interpretation of their intent, without any data to support it. Just take the statement at face value.

The only correct grouping to use which avoids offending anyone is "This fucker, That fucker, These fuckers, You fuckers):

  This fucker was fired from Meta for posting a social media video about Meta’s "baby benefits". Now the fucker posts another video saying they were useless to the org for 2 years and liked that job. Do they fucking enjoy sabotaging their career for likes?

Now it is gender neutral, uses no identifying groups, and is acceptable grammar to a large majority of the population.

You are misinterpreting my comment. It does not matter that she is a woman. Examine what offends you. You can learn a lot about yourself and maybe grow. Being offended by what some random man on the internet writes must be tiresome for you. Try assuming good intent.

I mean this in a friendly, productive manner: I also once didn't see the issue with the sentence as you stated it. Regardless of intent, the common reading of your sentence is that her being a woman has a specific significance, and especially because "woman" is a very slight dog whistle when compared to "lady" or "gal". Imagine saying "This black person..." as an extreme and hyperbolic comparison. It's clearly drawing attention to skin color. While your sentence is nowhere nearly that intense, there's clearly a spectrum and gray area.

You could have easily said "this person" or "this recruiter" or "the subject of this article"

This is what I meant. Just felt so routinely disrespectful and condescending.

If you are a $190k recruiter you should not be that surprised large orgs are like this. Meta wanted to recruit people, hired a recruiter and then higher ups changed course. Shit happens. Count your blessings and coast will ya?

I've met with maybe a half a dozen recruiters in my career and the only bad one was Facebook. The guy just flat out, lied to me. For a counterpoint for anyone interested, recruiters looking to hire away government folks have been exceedingly professional.

Why is it bad to be happy about Meta’s baby benefits? Presumably their employees are aware. Are they worried about floods of women that join Meta only to constantly pop out babies?

The nypost is a tabloid, and I'm not sure what the value of this post is. I'm sure there are plenty of people at large organizations that get paid much more than the value they provide, and this was mostly a case of bad timing.

It's nearly impossible to keep large organizations in sync while also secretly planning mass layoffs. She correctly got caught in a following wave.

My offer still stands: I will do nothing for half the price.

I see your offer and raise with mine: I will do twice as much nothing for a quarter of the price, remotely. You don't even have to give me a desk or a company laptop.

Surely this is why recruiters ghost me so much. /s

Probably why they were laid off?

FTA, although grain of salt:

> In a follow-up video, Machado told her followers that she was fired in spring 2022 by the company because an earlier video in which she touts the benefits package she received went viral.

> Machado said her superiors weren’t pleased when she revealed that the firm offers “$4,000 in baby cash” as well as “$3,000 for child care reimbursement.”

I guess they didn't want some employees to know what others were getting? If it were part of the standard package, that's good marketing for the company.

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